Ideas We Are Exploring

3-D Photo by Gerald Marks

For this project, we are looking at the parallels between the processes of raising awareness at a public level regarding the nature and condition of a site and raising awareness at a personal level regarding movement experience and balance.

In drawing parallels between public and personal awareness, we are interested in seeing how or if one’s knowledge and perceptions of site and self affect one’s understanding, appreciation and valuation of the other.

Through guided exploration, movement, in this case, will be used as a resource for assigning values (natural, environmental, social, historical, archaeological) to Dead Horse Bay. These values ultimately determine the site's cultural significance and frame the actions required to enhance or preserve that significance. Thus, in the first engagement, movement will not be used as a performance act per se, but rather as a means of responding to the environment and as an agent of change that can be experienced by both dancers and non-dancers alike.

We will direct this movement-based, awareness-building process by focusing on body structure and sensing while referring to the site's natural features: the swinging and bending of the invasive phragmites; the cyclical advancing and retreating of tidal movement; the subtle, barely perceptible curling of seasonal snails; the aged color of sea creatures stranded along the shoreline; the ad hoc layout of emerging debris; and the alignment of sun-setting and moon-rising as the day comes to an end.

We suspect that, as site values become integrated into the participants' own movement experience, they will become familiar with the character and condition of the site and develop an understanding of the need for advocacy on behalf of the site's improvement beyond the level of abstraction.

This natural scene, with its evidence of planned and unplanned man-made interventions, also provides a unique scenario for visual documentation to create a fund of imagery attesting to the site's significance and movement as an agent of change.



3-D Photo by Gerald Marks

About Our Collaboration

3-D Photo by Gerald Marks

This is a close collaborative process among the three of us, each having an active interest in every aspect of the project and how each other's work defines and enriches our own professional perspectives. Our collaboration stems from combining our interests in understanding and interpreting nature, causality, evolutionary change, structural integrity, assigning value to experience, and examining cultural behaviors; each contributing from the models and points of view of our respective fields.

Angel Ayón's work as an architect and preservationist focuses on the assessment and understanding of remaining physical evidence as an evolving and degraded yet still valid manifest of the past and as a determinant of current cultural significance.

Issues of time, evolution and space are also intrinsic to Sarah White's work as a dancer, choreographer, teacher and practitioner of the Alexander Technique. Sarah's work assigns new meanings to the kinesthetic relationship between the human body as a whole, its individual parts and the spaces it inhabits during a measured time lapse. As a movement analyst, she looks at patterns and potentials in movement experience that are affected by both internal awareness and outside influence. One of her areas of focus as a “mover” is the notion that through conscious movement practices one can develop a new understanding of their structure and function, which in turn leads to a new kinesthetic experience of the above and a newly assigned value to this experience. Similarly to Angel, the movement practices that she works with are intended to preserve the value and integrity of the human structure, its freedom to move and quality of experience. They are also about recognizing cultural influence on individual movement habits and conscious involvement in personal change and evolution.

Gerald Mark's work as a visual artist documents nature's constant metamorphosis and captures -to the slightest detail- the three-dimensional structure of both organic and inorganic worlds. Many of his images reveal the inherent aesthetic values in bio-structures. His work also comes out of a love and reverence for nature and cycles of change.


3-D Photo by Gerald Marks